Evo
šta veli i jezgrovito OBJAŠNJAVA naš veliki skeptik i veliki adept: The Great
Old One, HPL on Necronomicons...

Now about the
"terrible & forbidden books" —I am forced to say that most of
them are purely imaginary. There never was any Abdul Alhazred or Necronomicon, for I invented the names
myself. Robert Bloch devised the idea of Ludvig Prinn & his De Vermis Mysteriis, while the Book of Eibon is an invention of Clark
Ashton Smith's. The late Robert E. Howard is responsible for Friedrich von
Junzt & his Unaussprechlichen Kulten.

So far as Albertus Magnus
goes—there was such a person, but he never wrote any such thing as Egyptian Secrets. The latter must have
been merely one of the cheap occult compilations (like the 7th Book of Moses
&c.) which borrow impressive-sounding names to delude the public &
attract attention.

The real Albertus Magnus (Albrecht
von Bollstädt or de Groot) was an ecclesiastic and philosopher of the 13th
century, whose subtle speculations & knowledge of physical science caused
ignorant people to regard him as a magician or devil-worshipper, & to
associate his name with all sorts of things he never did & all sorts of
books he never wrote.

He was born in Swabia—at
Laningen on the Danube—in 1193, & was educated at Padua in Italy. He joined
the Dominican Friars in 1222, & was made Provincial of the order in 1254.
He taught at Cologne, & had the famous ecclesiastical philosopher Thomas
Aquinas as a pupil. He was made Bishop of Regensburg in 1259, but resigned
three years later.

Only 4 years ago—in
1932—the Catholic Church made him a saint. His works were first printed in
Lyons & Leyden in 1651, by the Dominican friar Pierre Jammy. They amount to
21 large volumes, but some of these are probably spurious. The genuine ones
relate wholly to philosophy & physical science, in which he was a follower
of Aristotle. He founded a distinct school of Philosophy, called the
"Albertists".

Enemies accused him of
black magic, & circulated all manner of legends concerning him. In his old
age he fell into a sort of dotage, & may have made eccentric utterances
& demonstrations which bore out the popular legendry.

The most famous story about
Albertus is that of his dinner to King William of Holland in 1240, in the
garden of his monastery. It was midwinter, & the King was astonished at
being asked to dine outdoors.

But when the party adjourned to the garden, they
found it full of flowers & greenery, & gay with singing birds. This
naturally sounded like magic to the Middle Ages, but the truth is that the
garden was probably a greenhouse, roofed over with some transparent substance
& powerfully heated.

However, the anecdote (if
true) shows that Albertus liked to astonish people. The habit of calling
Albertus an alchemist probably arose from a passage in his De Rebus Metallicus et Mineralibus, where he speaks of testing the
gold which an alchemist claimed to have made, & of finding it very
infusible.

This alchemical reputation
grew to such an extent that Michael Maier (alchemist & author of Musaeum Chemicum) declared that he had
actually found the "Philosopher's Stone" & had given the secret
to his pupil Thomas Aquinas. All of which shows that Al was quite a boy —though
he never wrote some of the miscellaneous fantastic junk attributed to him— either
the book you mention, or the better-known De
Secretis Mulierum.

As for seriously-written books on dark, occult, &
supernatural themes —in all truth, they don't amount to much. That is why it's more fun
to invent mythical works like the Necronomicon
& Book of Eibon.

The magical lore which
superstitious people really believed, & which trickled down to the Middle
Ages from antiquity, was really nothing more than a lot of childish invocations
& formulae for raising daemons &c., plus systems of speculation as dry
as the orthodox philosophies. It was merely a lot of ill-assorted odds & ends—memories
of Graeco-Roman mystery-cults, Pythagorean speculation (embodying ideas from
India), Egyptian, Babylonian, Persian, & Jewish magic, & the
Neoplatonism & Manichaeism of the late Roman Empire.

The Alexandrian Jews were
probably most active in keeping it alive —hence the preponderance of Jewish
Kabbalism in the puerile mixture. The Byzantines & Arabs also clung to such
stuff —to which was added the scraps of popular European superstition (Latin,
Teutonic, Celtic), & the dark lore of the furtive Dianic cults (responsible
for witches' Sabbats &c.) which perpetuated the revolting remnants of a
lost pre-Aryan nature-worship.

All this lore was
disconnected & fragmentary, & there was never any especial book holding
a large amount of it. The so-called "Hermetic Volumes" of
"Hermes Trismegistus" are simply a set of metaphysical scraps from 3d
century Neoplatonism & Philonic Judaisim. It is not until modern times that
we see any attempt to collect & codify these scraps.

What the mediaeval &
renaissance philosophers & "magicians" wrote is mostly namby-pamby stuff of their own
devising —plus the popular folklore of their day (cf. Paracelsus, &c).
The first serious collection of ancient magical scraps was Francis Barrett's The Magus —published in 1805 or so &
reprinted in 1896.

The first really scholarly
material of this sort was the work of the eccentric Frenchman Alphonse-Louis
Constant (middle of 19th century), who wrote under the pseudonym "Eliphas
Levi". More compilation of the same kind has been done by Arthur Edward
Waite (still living, I believe)—who has also translated "Eliphas
Levi's" books into English.

If you want to see what the
actual "magical" rites & incantations of antiquity & the
Middle Ages were like, get the works of Waite —especially his "Black Magic"
& "History of Magic". Sorry I don't own these —if I did I'd be
glad to lend them. Other stuff can be found in Waite's translations of
"Eliphas Levi".

There is a more popular
history of sorcery by "Sax Rhomer" (Arthur Sarsfield Ward), whose
title I forget. But you will undoubtedly find all this stuff very
disappointing. It is flat, childish,
pompous, & unconvincing —merely a record of human childishness &
gullibiity in past ages.

Any good fiction-writer can
think up "records of primal horror" which surpass in imaginative
force any occult production which has sprung from genuine credulousness. The crap of the theosophists —which
falls into the class of conscious fakery —is interesting in spots. It combines
some genuine Hindoo & other Oriental myths with a subtle charlatanism
obviously drawn from 19th century scientific concepts.

Scott-Elliot's
"Atlantis & the Lost Lemuria" & Sinnett's "Esoteric
Buddhism" are rather fascinating. Clark Ashton Smith knows a lot of this
stuff, & E. Hoffmann Price read up on it rather extensively some years ago.

Pseudo-scientific or
semi-charlatanic stuff forms a class by itself. Among this material (all of
which is good fictional source-reading) is the "Atlantis" lore
promulgated by Le Plongeon, Donnelly, & Lewis SPence, the "Mu" books
of the late Col. Churchward, the miscellaneous editions of Charles Fort,
&c., &c. Some of these authors are plain fakers, while others are self-deluded "nuts". But even
this kind of thing can't equal a really well-written story.

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Dejan Ognjanovic was born in Nis, Serbia, in 1973. He worked as a TA in American Literature at the Faculty of Philosophy, Nis (1999-2009). Got his MA in 2009 ('Gothic Motifs in the Works of E. A. Poe') and his PhD in 2012 ('Historical Poetics of Horror Genre in Anglo-American Literature'). Writes book and film reviews and articles for Rue Morgue magazine. In Serbia he has published 9 books: novels In Vivo (2003) and The Seducer (2014); three studies: Faustian Screen: The Devil in Cinema (2006), In the Hills, the Horrors: Serbian Horror Film (2007) and Poetics of Horror (2014), a collection of essays A Study in Terror (2008) and a book of interviews More than Truth (2017); and he edited H. P. Lovecraft's best stories (Nekronomikon, 2008.) and co-edited The New Frames (2008), on Serbian cinema. His essays were published in the books edited by Steven Schneider: 100 European Horror Films, 501 Movie Directors, 101 Horror / SF / Gangster / War Movies You Must See Before You Die, and also in Speaking of Monsters (2012) and Digital Nightmares (2015). He is an editor at Orfelin Publishing (Novi Sad, Serbia). His reviews in English can be found at Beyond Hollywood, Unrated and Quiet Earth.